Teresa Cos, the winner of first prize in the 2011 95th Young Artists’ Collective at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, and a participant in NI DIEU NI MAÎTRE, the double group show with which the Galleria Massimodeluca initiated its exhibition activities, is now back in Mestre with an exhibition curated by Andrea Bruciati, the first solo show of her career. On display will be 40 photographic works she created in the course of a year, which make up a unique non-linear narrative exemplifying the existential and expressive anxiety at the base of her artistic output. This is made even more obvious by the means used, photography, and the strength and originality with which she bends it to her vision of the world.

“Enten-Eller (Either/Or) is the title of the famous work in which the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard analyzes and compares the two basic approaches to human life: the ethical and the aesthetic—a path of knowledge which inevitably leads the philosopher to deal with the limits of aesthetic life,” explains the curator Andrea Bruciati. “The despair that follows however is positive, because it becomes the necessary stimulus to embrace the ethical life. The anguish of the philosopher, like that of Cos, is in some ways an analogous precursor of existential anxiety and the decadence of a society that dwells on itself. In the throes of this anxiety it is not enough to accept the reality of those who use photography to document their expressive needs; these images almost obsessively record elements of reality, textures, and details made even more evident and ‘macabre’ through the overwhelming use of flash. It is as if the images were bathed in a light that serves to increase our sensory perception, causing us to see things so well it instills doubt about their authenticity. They become surfaces that you almost want to touch to stimulate a different understanding of reality.” The exhibition of Teresa Cos—Bruciati concludes—is thus conceived as a film that takes place within a single night (although the images were shot in the course of an entire year), a non-linear narrative made up of flashbacks, moments belonging to another time and a suspended and indefinite place, following the line of vision, leading us finally to confront ourselves, our masks, and the death of ourselves and society.”